POE THE CROW
her husband had been off his game for so long that, by this stage, her encouragement sounded hollow. It didn’t help that the artist’s agent, Mr. Rimbaud, phoned several times a day to inquire how the new work was progressing and to give suggestions that Mr. Wooten invariably rejected. Mr. Wooten recently had unplugged the phone in the studio, and Mrs. Wooten had begun screening incoming calls before answering. Even so, their voice mail was full of increasingly frantic calls from the agent reminding Mr. Wooten of how many weeks remained before the opening of his next show at the gallery. So far the artist had completed only one new painting, and he needed to paint at least ten more by the end of summer. Later in the day Mrs. Wooten wondered what her husband’s mood would be at dinner. As she started to prepare two pork chops, one tofu burger, and some high-protein mush for Poe, she wondered how much longer it would take her husband to climb out of his slump. As Ellie watched her mother cook, she wondered how much longer she would be able to hold out as a vegetarian—and how long they would be able to hide a baby crow from her father.
46
CHAPTER
7
Good or Bad Omen? In other years, the week of spring break had always passed too quickly for Ellie. Just as she had settled into the relaxing routine of staying in her pajamas until late morning, painting beside her father in his studio, helping her mother start seedlings for the family’s vegetable garden, and having sleepovers with her friend Mimi, the idyllic week would suddenly end, and school would resume. This year was different. The week seemed to crawl by. Perhaps it was because Ellie, like other new mothers, was sleep-deprived and tied down by her baby’s almost constant need to eat. Every morning before dawn Poe awoke “with the birds” to demand his first meal of the day. Ellie kept his special food in a container on her bedside table and his shoebox nest on the floor next to her bed, so she could lean over and feed him without even getting out of bed. She still 47